In 2019, over two years before the publication of her book Emotional Female, Yumiko Kadota wrote a blog post titled ‘The ugly side of becoming a surgeon’. It’s a piece that hurts the moment it begins, with Kadota lamenting that she must ‘surrender…[her] dream of becoming a surgeon.’
American poet Patricia Lockwood’s debut fiction novel No One Is Talking About This discusses how we position ourselves in relation to the Internet. The novel’s protagonist is a woman who has become famous for an innocuous viral tweet—loosely inspired by Lockwood’s own participation in the forming of ‘weird Twitter’—which leads to her travelling the world, speaking as an authority on digital communication.
Anwen Crawford’s No Document is many things: a letter to a lost friend; a history of art and protest; a practice of redaction and remembering; a call to action; and a lament. No Document is a text made up of fragments.
In Cold Enough for Snow, Au's subtle, melancholic style describes a world in which human connection is always fleeting, but never entirely out of reach. A young woman, the novella’s unnamed narrator, has invited her mother on a holiday. The distance between them is clear from the beginning.
In Theory of Colours, Bella Li’s third full-length poetry collection, a planet slides into entropy. Inspired by poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s treatise of the same name, Li blurs distinctions between absence and presence to create a haunting meditation on the universe.
Bri Lee’s latest non-fiction work Who Gets to be Smart is a compilation of research and personal anecdotes that investigates the correlation between privilege, power and knowledge.
We Were Not Men tells the story of Jon and Eden Hardacre, twin brothers who are ejected from their childhood by the tragic death of their parents.
In Jessie Tu’s debut novel A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing, we follow a twenty-something-year-old violin prodigy named Jena, whose pattern of floating from one male prospect to the next is interrupted when she lands a temporary spot with the prestigious New York Philharmonic.
Shelley Parker-Chan’s debut historical-fantasy novel, She Who Became the Sun, is a queer reimagining of the inception of the Ming Dynasty in China.
Hysteria, Katerina Bryant’s debut memoir, is an exceptional and intimate portrayal of mental illness.
